Yay for the saturday afternoon updates!Got to try the monk changes, but going orc seems to be very obvious now :/Lifesteal piety sounds very awesome however! Also the adjusted costs for initial/repeating boons.

I'm really not liking the new GG piety costs. Cleansing sucked before (using a potion to heal poison/burn costs 10 piety and also heals you), now it sucks more. Absolution wasn't worth it before, converting to another god and killing the enemies for exp and piety is simply better (and sanctify for GG piety and exp was sometimes even better than that). Absolution is only useful if you cant convert. Good enough I guess, but why the stacking piety cost for these two already underpowered boons?

Sanctify now gets you a total of 12 extra piety. After that you have to pay piety to be allowed to take out low level enemies. After a while the cost becomes higher than taking the actual penalty. Also you pretty much have to chose between enlightenment and everything else. With potion conversion giving only 2 piety and the sanctify change there barely is enough piety in the game to get enlightenment, so if you actually do get it you cant use potions afterwards. And the removed exp from low level enemies (sanctify change again) means worshiping GG for humility isn't worth it anymore either.

GG was just way more fun before. He doesn't let me do anything. I cant kill who I want, I cant drink potions, I cant use some glyphs, and I don't really get anything for it. Would not worship again, he's worse than old TT. Taking humility and maybe one heal, then converting asap seems like the only useful thing to do with him now.

I didn't try the other gods yet, I hope they are still useful.

The monk change seems fine. Harsh nerf, but monk still seems viable and might even still be powerful in some situations (or with a tri-sword). Going human was obvious before, going orc is obvious now. So no change there. I just did the first monk challenge quest as an orc and it wasn't that hard (as expected of a normal dungeon). Mostly GG annoyed the hell out of me, monk was fine.

Does Monk change have any ramification other than "Use Orcs instead of humans"? I'm not good enough at the math to test it out.

I don't know if Monk should be nerfed though... in a sense After all, the class has an in-built weakness to enemies who can permenently reduce your stats through combat. And guess how many of those are in the harder dungeons. In the original Alpha the only weakeners were in one dungeon: Snake Pit. Every single other enemy in that dungeon was extremely easy to kill though.

Also Mystera Annur seems... uh, as overnerfed as GG. Mana boon has scaling piety cost which prevents it from going into overdrive while the magic resistance penalty was increased. Scaling piety seems like a good fix for 50 mana Paladins but why increase the magic resistance penalty? It already wasn't really being used by Fireball casters and still does nothing to Cydsteppers

I've played and loved Orc Monks before the update. Maybe I'm just stupid, but it was very fun (often with HP for ATK preparation though). Would give it a go tomorrow to see how things work now.

Even if the Monk change stays, I hope we do get another melee class with lowered ATK bonus. It's.... just meant to be.

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On a side note, I just saw an Yin-Yang subdungeon while there's no ENDISWAL glyph on the map (no WONAFYT either, but seriously who cares about that guy?). Could this be....tuned down a bit? I'm fine with the money/gold one that requires ENDISWAL, but the YinYang subdungeon is so rare to encounter in the first place, that making it an impossible situation is just harsh.

So even if you use an orc you do lower damage than before pretty much always. With Trog or some preparations you can get fairly close to the old damage. I guess with a double sensory stone new orc monk can beat old human monk, but that doesn't exactly happen much. Also with lots of conversion points damage race monks can do more damage than non-damage race other classes, but not more damage than damage focused characters.

Edit: I just realized that taking the attack boost for health prep might skew the results in the old monks favor. So here are the last two without that prep:

Edit 2:level 1, trog's sword, no boosts or conversions: old 7, new 12, baseline 15. Looks like I finally found a situation where the new monk is stronger. Still way weaker at low levels than old trisword monk though.

Last edited by Galefury on Sat Aug 13, 2011 4:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Wow, the Slime Pit should be called "We Hate Monks Inc.". Still doable with a monk (as per the quest), but hard, especially with the god nerf. Dracul did the trick for me though, decent god both for the monk and for the level. Fun quest line, and a nice way to get people to test out the new monk. From reading the description the reward item doesn't seem very useful though, and I didn't want to overwrite a locker slot to test it.

Also I hope the sludge mines come back at some point. I didn't like them, but they were a different sort of challenge than most other levels. And having different types of challenges is a good thing, even if some of them are really annoying. Plus some people actually liked the mines.